Holtz's Irish Abandon Option? Don't Believe It

October 01, 1993|By Joseph Tybor.

Lou Holtz must feel like the king without clothes.

As he prepares for a showdown Saturday against Bill Walsh and the Stanford Cardinal, Holtz says he might have to scrap the option. That is like President Clinton going without Hillary in his push for health-care reform.

"We're playing with a couple of freshman tailbacks. And our quarterbacks just do not have a real good grasp of it," said Holtz. "We've worked on it, but we're basically about ready to hang up on it.

"If a guy can't do it and he's made a legitimate, honest effort to try to do it, then, hey, you sort of close ranks and march on."

Holtz loves those military analogies.

Listen to him downplay the No. 4 ranking of his undefeated Notre Dame team.

"We're not in the national-championship race at all," he says. "We're fleeing for our lives. All we want to do is survive each and every week, and have someone fall on a hand grenade to save the group."

There is no doubt quarterback Kevin McDougal has struggled in trying to run the option. He scrambles and sprints well, but lacks the timing instincts to freeze defenders at the corner, then pitch or head upfield.

Still, the option is the best weapon against the man-to-man defense Walsh likes to employ against the pass. It boggles the mind that Holtz would publicly say he is giving up on it, so there must be motive to his madness.

Just as he speaks military idiom in football, Holtz copies military stratagem and there is none more widely followed than that contained in the writings of an ancient Chinese warrior.

Recorded nearly 2,500 years ago, Sun Tzu's writings give a clue to what Holtz may really be doing when he tells a national TV satellite hookup of reporters that he is about to scrap the option-his favorite offensive weapon-just days before he is about to meet Notre Dame's worst nemesis of the last three years.

"All warfare is based on deception," Sun Tzu wrote in a section on elemental tactics. "Hence, when able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces, we must seem inactive; when we are near, we must make the enemy believe that we are far away; when far away, we must make him believe we are near.

"Hold out baits to entice the enemy. Feign disorder, and crush him."

There is no team the Irish would like better to annihilate than Stanford; though, again, Holtz would like you to believe otherwise.

Twice in the last three years, the Cardinal has ruined the national-championship hopes of Notre Dame. Last year, Stanford came back from a 16-0 deficit and scored the final 33 points of the game to win.

"Nah, none at all," Holtz replied in answer to whether or not there was a grudge factor to the game. "Somebody asked me the other day about revenge and I said with the lady on the dome and a Christian school, I don't think they want to hear you talking about revenge."